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Andrew McCluskey

Welcome to The Race Card Project! - The Race Card Project - 46 views

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    What you see here are candid submissions from people who have engaged in a little exercise. Here's how it works. Think about the word Race. How would you distill your thoughts, experiences or observations about race into one sentence that only has six words?
C CC

Exercise Book to Spark Creativity - 56 views

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    Interesting
tapiatanova

A Social Network Can Be a Learning Network - The Digital Campus - The Chronicle of High... - 98 views

  • Sharing student work on a course blog is an example of what Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, of Georgetown University, call "social pedagogies." They define these as "design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an 'authentic audience' (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course."
    • trisha_poole
       
      Very important - social pedagogies for authentic tasks - a key for integrating SNTs in the classroom.
    • Daniel Spielmann
       
      Agreed, for connectivism see also www.connectivism.ca
  • External audiences certainly motivate students to do their best work. But students can also serve as their own authentic audience when asked to create meaningful work to share with one another.
    • Daniel Spielmann
       
      The last sentence is especially important in institutional contexts where the staff voices their distrust against "open scholarship" (Weller 2011), web 2.0 and/or open education. Where "privacy" is deemed the most important thing in dealing with new technologies, advocates of an external audience have to be prepared for certain questions.
    • tapiatanova
       
      yes! nothing but barriers! However, it is unclear if the worries about pravacy are in regards to students or is it instructors who fear teaching in the open. everyone cites FERPA and protection of student identities, but I have yet to hear any student refusing to work in the open...
  • Students most likely won't find this difficult. After all, you're asking them to surf the Web and tag pages they like. That's something they do via Facebook every day. By having them share course-related content with their peers in the class, however, you'll tap into their desires to be part of your course's learning community. And you might be surprised by the resources they find and share.
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  • back-channel conversations
  • While keynote speakers and session leaders are speaking, audience members are sharing highlights, asking questions, and conversing with colleagues on Twitter
    • trisha_poole
       
      An effective use of Twitter that can be translated to classrooms.
    • Daniel Spielmann
       
      All classrooms?
    • John Dorn
       
      classrooms where students are motivated to learn. Will this work in a HS classroom where kids just view their phones as a means to check up on people? Maybe if they can see "cool" class could be if they were responsible for the freedoms that would be needed to use twitter or other similar sites.
  • Ask your students to create accounts on Twitter or some other back-channel tool and share ideas that occur to them in your course. You might give them specific assignments, as does the University of Connecticut's Margaret Rubega, who asks students in her ornithology class to tweet about birds they see. During a face-to-face class session, you could have students discuss their reading in small groups and share observations on the back channel. Or you could simply ask them to post a single question about the week's reading they would like to discuss.
  • A back channel provides students a way to stay connected to the course and their fellow students. Students are often able to integrate back channels into their daily lives, checking for and sending updates on their smartphones, for instance. That helps the class become more of a community and gives students another way to learn from each other.
  • Deep learning is hard work, and students need to be well motivated in order to pursue it. Extrinsic factors like grades aren't sufficient—they motivate competitive students toward strategic learning and risk-averse students to surface learning.
  • Social pedagogies provide a way to tap into a set of intrinsic motivations that we often overlook: people's desire to be part of a community and to share what they know with that community.
  • Online, social pedagogies can play an important role in creating such a community. These are strong motivators, and we can make use of them in the courses we teach.
  • The papers they wrote for my course weren't just academic exercises; they were authentic expressions of learning, open to the world as part of their "digital footprints."
    • Daniel Spielmann
       
      Yes, but what is the relation between such writing and ("proper"?) academic writing?
  • Collaborative documents need not be text-based works. Sarah C. Stiles, a sociologist at Georgetown, has had her students create collaborative timelines showing the activities of characters in a text, using a presentation tool called Prezi.com. I used that tool to have my cryptography students create a map of the debate over security and privacy. They worked in small groups to brainstorm arguments, and contributed those arguments to a shared debate map synchronously during class.
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    A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
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    A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
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    A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
Steve Kelly

What would an exceptional middle and high school computer science curriculum include? -... - 48 views

  • What would an exceptional middle and high school computer science curriculum include?
  • This isn't a complete answer, but one thing the very first introductory classes should require is that the students turn off all their electronic computers and actually learn to walk through  algorithms with a computer that exists only on paper. (Or, I suppose, a whiteboard or a simulator.) This exercise would give the students a grounding in what is going on inside the computer as a very low level.My first computer programming class in my Freshman year of high school was completely on paper. Although it was done because the school didn't have much money, it turned out to be very beneficial.Another class I had in high school, that wouldn't normally be lumped into a Computer Science curriculum but has been a boon to my career, was good old Typing 101.
  • If you followed the CS Unplugged curriculum your students would know more about CS than most CS grads:http://csunplugged.orgIt's a really great intro to basic computer science concepts and very easy for students to understand.  Best of all you don't even need a computer per student if your school doesn't have the budget,
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  • For younger students, I think that the ability to make something professional-looking, like a real grown-up would, is paramount.  Sadly, I think this means that LOGO and BASIC aren't much use any more*.
  • So, we have a few choices.  You can try to write phone apps that look just like real phone apps, design interactive websites that look just like real interactive websites, or do something with embedded systems / robotics.  Avoid the temptation to make these things into group projects; the main thing every student needs to experience is the process of writing code, running it, debugging it, and watching the machine react to every command.
  • It is important to consider what an 11 to 18-year old is familiar with in terms of mathematics and logical thinking. An average 11-year old is probably learning about fractions, simple cartesian geometry, the concept of units, and mathematical expressions. By 15, the average student will be taking algebra, and hopefully will have the all-important concept of variables under his/her belt. So much in CS is dependent on solid understanding that symbols and tokens can represent abstract concepts, values, or algorithms. Without it, it's still possible to teach CS, but it must be done in a very different way (see Scratch).
  • At this point, concepts such as variables, parenthesis matching, and functions (of the mathematical variety) are within easy reach. Concepts like parameter passing, strings and collections, and program flow should be teachable. More advanced concepts such as recursion, references and pointers, certain data structures, and big-O may be very difficult to teach without first going through some more foundational math.
  • I tend to agree strongly with those that believe a foundational education should inspire interest and enforce concepts and critical thinking over teaching any specific language, framework, system, or dogma.
  • The key is that the concepts in CS aren't just there for the hell of it. Everything was motivated by a real problem, and few things are more satisfying than fixing something you really want to work with a cool technique or concept you just learned.
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    Great resource for teachers (especially those of us not initially trained in Computer Science) about what should 'count' as Computer Science.  Worth the read!
Cynthia Sarver

CITE Journal - Language Arts - 94 views

  • Since it is through communication that we exercise our political, economic and social power, we risk contributing to the hegemonic perpetuation of class if we fail to demand equal access to newer technologies and adequately prepared teachers for all students
    • Cynthia Sarver
       
      What is being done??
  • They can benefit their students by developing and then teaching their students to develop expertise in evaluation of search engines and critical analysis of Web site credibility. Well-prepared teachers, with a deep and broad understanding of language, linguistics, literature, rhetoric, writing, speaking, and listening, can complement those talents by studying additional semiotic systems that don’t rely solely on alphabetic texts.
  • Not only will teachers need to understand “fair use” policies, they are likely to need to integrate units on ethics back into the curriculum to complement those units on rhetoric.
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  • Students should be counseled not only on the risks to their physical safety, but also on the ways that the texts they are composing today, and believe they have eliminated, often have lives beyond their computers, and may reappear in the future at a most inopportune time.
  • learn methods of critically analyzing the ways in which others are using multiple semiotic systems to convince them to participate, to buy, to believe, and to resist a wide range of appeals
  • It also implies the process of uncovering one’s own cultural, social, political and personal (e.g. age, gender) backgrounds and understanding how these backgrounds can and often do influence one’s own ways of communicating and interacting with others in virtual and face-to-face encounters.
  • nstances of anti-social behavior in online communication such as using hurtful language and discriminating among certain members of virtual communities have been reported.
  • allows their members to construct and act out identities that may not necessarily be their real selves and thus lose a sense of responsibility toward others
  • Professional development for teachers and teacher educators must be ongoing, stressing purposeful integration for the curriculum and content, rather than merely technical operation. It also needs to provide institutional and instructional support systems to enable teachers to learn and experiment with new technologies. Offering release time, coordinating student laptop initiative programs or providing wireless laptop carts for classroom use, locating computer labs in accessible places to each teacher, scheduling lab sessions acceptable for each teacher, and providing alternative scheduling for professional development sessions so that all teachers can attend, are a few examples of such systems. Finally, teachers and students must be provided with technical support as they work with technology. Such assistance must be reliable, on-demand, and timely for each teacher and student in each classroom.
  • educators must address plagiarism, ownership, and authorship in their classrooms.
  • strategies to assess the quality of information and writing on the Web
  • help students develop netiquette
  • Such netiquette is thus not only about courtesy; more importantly, it is about tolerance and acceptance of people with diverse languages, cultures, and worldviews.
  • Teachers and teacher educators must examine with students the social processes through which humans grow individually and socially, and they must expose the potentially negative consequences of one’s individual actions. In doing so, teachers and educators will be able to reinforce the concept of learning as a social process, involving negotiation, dialogue, and learning from each other, and as a thinking process, requiring self-directed learning as well as critical analysis and synthesis of information in the process of meaning-making and developing informed perceptions of the world.
Amy Roediger

Reading Strategies for 'Informational Text' - NYTimes.com - 172 views

  • Four Corners and Anticipation Guides:Both of these techniques “activate schema” by asking students to react in some way to a series of controversial statements about a topic they are about to study. In Four Corners, students move around the room to show their degree of agreement or disagreement with various statements — about, for instance, the health risks of tanning, or the purpose of college, or dystopian teen literature. An anticipation guide does the same thing, though generally students simply react in writing to a list of statements on a handout. In this warm-up to a lesson on some of the controversies currently raging over school reform, students can use the statements we provide in either of these ways.
  • Gallery Walks:A rich way to build background on a topic at the beginning of a unit (or showcase learning at the end), Gallery Walks for this purpose are usually teacher-created collections of images, articles, maps, quotations, graphs and other written and visual texts that can immerse students in information about a broad subject. Students circulate through the gallery, reading, writing and talking about what they see.
  • Graphic Organizers:
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  • Making Text-to-Text/Text-to-Self/Text-to-World connectionsCharting Debatable IssuesListing Facts/Questions/ResponsesIdentifying Cause and EffectSupporting Opinions With FactsTracking The Five W’s and an HIdentifying Multiple Points of ViewIdentifying a Problem and SolutionComparing With a Venn Diagram
  • The One-Pager:Almost any student can find a “way in” with this strategy, which involves reacting to a text by creating one page that shows an illustration, question and quote that sum up some key aspect of what a student learned.
  • “Popcorn Reads”:Invite students to choose significant words, phrases or whole sentences from a text or texts to read aloud in random fashion, without explanation. Though this may sound pointless until you try it, it is an excellent way for students to “hear” some of the high points or themes of a text emerge, and has the added benefit of being an activity any reader can participate in easily.
  • Illustrations:Have students create illustrations for texts they’re reading, either in the margins as they go along, or after they’ve finished. The point of the exercise is not, of course, to create beautiful drawings, but to help them understand and retain the information they learn.
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    Update | Feb. 2012: We'll be exploring the new Common Core State Standards, and how teaching with The Times can address them, through a series of blog posts. You can find them all here, tagged "the NYT and the CCSS."
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    A good list of reading strategies for informational text from the New York Times.
fergtoo

the Truth About Being a Hero - WSJ - 14 views

  • We all want to be special, to stand out; there's nothing wrong with this. The irony is that every human being is special to start with, because we're unique to start with.
  • n the military I could exercise the power of being automatically respected because of the medals on my chest, not because I had done anything right at the moment to earn that respect.
  • I knew many Marines had done brave deeds that no one saw and for which they got no medals at all.
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  • "A lot of people have done a lot more and gotten a lot less, and a lot of people have done a lot less and gotten a lot more."
  • I got my medals, in part, because I did brave acts, but also, in part, because the kids liked me and they spent time writing better eyewitness accounts than they would have written if they hadn't liked me
  • The only people who will ever know the value of the ribbons on their chests are the people wearing them—and even they can fool themselves, in both directions.
  • he whole assault ground to a halt, except for one kid named Niemi, who had sprinted forward when we came under the intense fire and disappeared up in front of us somewhere.
  • alking to a group of us about when it was a platoon leader earned his pay. I knew, floating above that mess, that now that time had come. If I didn't get up and lead, we'd get wiped.
  • I'm most proud of is that I simply stood up, in the middle of all that flying metal, and started up the hill all by myself.
  • I did it for the right reasons.
  • At this point I saw the missing kid, Niemi, pop his head up. He sprinted across the open top of the hill, all alone.
  • He was a black kid, all tangled up in black-power politics, almost always angry and sullen. A troublemaker. Yet here he was, most of his body naked with only flapping rags left of his jungle utilities, begging for a rifle when he had a perfect excuse to just bury his head in the clay and quit. I gave him mine. I still had a pistol. He grabbed the rifle, stood up to his full height, fully exposing himself to all the fire, and simply blasted an entire magazine at the two soldiers in front of us, killing both of them. He then went charging into the fight, leaving me stunned for a moment. Why? Who was he doing this for? What is this thing in young men? We were beyond ourselves, beyond politics, beyond good and evil. This was transcendence.
  • Crashing out of the clouds into this confusion came a flaming, smoking twin-rotor CH-46 helicopter.
  • I saw Niemi pop into sight again. He sprinted to the downed chopper.
  • the only thing he could think to do was sprint across the open hilltop to see if he could find a place from which he could lay down fire to protect them.
  • Niemi got a Navy Cross.
  • I got a Navy Cross.
  • elicopter pilot
  • ont-page story
  • The kid who borrowed my rifle didn't get anyt
  • hing.
  • It was just about that time I got knocked out and blinded by a hand grenade. I came to, groggy.
  • hen a kid I knew from Second Platoon, mainly because of his bad reputation, threw himself down beside me, half his clothes blown away. He was begging people for a rifle. His had been blown out of his hands.
Joe Virant

Does Easy Do It? Children, Games, and Learning - 29 views

  • The kind of product I shall pick on here has the form of a game: the player gets into situations that require an appropriate action in order to get on to the next situation along the road to the final goal. So far, this sounds like "tainment." The "edu" part comes from the fact that the actions are schoolish exercises such as those little addition or multiplication sums that schools are so fond of boring kids with. It is clear enough why people do this. Many who want to control children (for example, the less imaginative members of the teaching profession or parents obsessed with kids' grades) become green with envy when they see the energy children pour into computer games. So they say to themselves, "The kids like to play games, we want them to learn multiplication tables, so everyone will be happy if we make games that teach multiplication." The result is shown in a rash of ads that go like this: "Our Software Is So Much Fun That The Kids Don't Even Know That They Are Learning" or "Our Games Make Math Easy."
  • What is worst about school curriculum is the fragmentation of knowledge into little pieces. This is supposed to make learning easy, but often ends up depriving knowledge of personal meaning and making it boring. Ask a few kids: the reason most don't like school is not that the work is too hard, but that it is utterly boring.
  • game designers have a better take on the nature of learning than curriculum designers. They have to. Their livelihoods depend on millions of people being prepared to undertake the serious amount of learning needed to master a complex game. If their public failed to learn, they would go out of business. In the case of curriculum designers, the situation is reversed: their business is boosted whenever students fail to learn and schools clamor for a new curriculum!
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  • watching kids work at mastering games confirms what I know from my own experience: learning is essentially hard; it happens best when one is deeply engaged in hard and challenging activities.
  • The preoccupation in America with "Making It Easy" is self-defeating and cause for serious worry about the deterioration of the learning environment.
  • I have found that when they get the support and have access to suitable software systems, children's enthusiasm for playing games easily gives rise to an enthusiasm for making them, and this in turn leads to more sophisticated thinking about all aspects of games, including those aspects that we are discussing here. Of course, the games they can make generally lack the polish and the complexity of those made by professional designers. But the idea that children should draw, write stories and play music is not contradicted by the fact that their work is not of professional quality. I would predict that within a decade, making a computer game will be as much a part of children's culture as any of these art forms.
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    Dr. Seymour Papert describes ways in which gaming enhances learning. June, 1998.
Ryan Trauman

Jeff G - Closing Argument - 0 views

  • Rachel Johnson is quoted in the article saying
    • Ryan Trauman
       
      Which article are you taking this from?
  • You could make things so that people must get exercise
  • the institutionalized practices and policies of government and the fast food industry
    • Ryan Trauman
       
      This is a really interesting quotation. Can you take it apart a bit more? What does she mean when she writes this? How could "the government" play a different role?
Mary Beth  Messner

GPC Center for Teaching and Learning - Online Resources - 74 views

  • Online Resources   Here
  • a collection of Online Resources by Subject Area.  This list is NOT exhaustive, but is a great start for incorporating stimulating (online) exercises into your teaching
  • English
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  • ACCOUNTING
  • ECONOMICS
  • BUSINESS LAW
  • English as a Second Language/Foreign Languag
  • HISTORY
  • Humanitie
  • Best Practices in Teaching Writing
  • Nursing/Dental Hygiene
  • PSYCHOLOGY
  • Biology
  • Chemistry
  • Mathematics
  • Sign Language & Interpreting Related Links
  • Computers and Technology
Maggie Tsai

new! Delete student accounts | optional student personal profile - 43 views

If you already have created some student accounts prior to these new changes, and wish to have your students' personal info section completely disabled, please send us a private email and advise...

delete student account teacher console

Martin Leicht

Distracted Minds: Why You Should Teach Like a Poet - 4 views

  • Routine is a great deadener of attention.
  • When you follow the same routines at home, folding the laundry or doing the dishes, your mind goes on automatic pilot.
  • same generic suite of teaching activities: listen to a lecture, take notes, ask some questions, talk in groups.
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  • Be astonished.
  • Pay attention.
  • Through the creative turns of language they use to describe the world and our experiences, the familiar becomes unfamiliar again, and we discover in the everyday world fresh food for insight and reflection.
  • We want them to pay attention to course content, to be astonished by what they find there, and to report back to us and the world what they have discovered.
  • Find an everyday object that connects to your discipline, or a photograph or image that accompanies an article or book in your field.
  • Close — and I mean really close — reading.
  • in which practitioners slowly read the sacred scriptures of Judaism aloud to one another, pausing and discussing and questioning at every turn.
  • Tell about it.
  • asked what they had learned from the experience, and especially what they had noticed about the text that they hadn’t perceived before
    • Martin Leicht
       
      Metacognition exercise of sorts?
  • Engagement with objects.
  • pointed out anomalies and inconsistencies, and wondered
  • What? For the first step, students spend time just observing the object and taking notes.
  • So what? Students write down questions based on their observations and share them with one another.
  • Now what? The final stage shifts into more whole-class and teacher-centered discussion
  • Attention through assessments.
  • For 13 consecutive weeks, she asked students to leave the campus and make a visit to the nearby Worcester Art Museum in order to spend time in front of the same work of art.
  • As they learned to train their attention on a work of art, their attention brought them insights. They saw more clearly, developed new ideas, and wrote creatively about what they observed.
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    Could some or all of this work online to build engagement? 1) close reading 2) engage with objects 3) attention through assessments
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